Critical Essay by Lillian Schanfield

SOURCE: Schanfield, Lillian. “Singer's ‘Yentl’: The Fantastic Case of a Perplexed Soul.” In Spectrum of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Sixth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Donald Palumbo, pp. 185-92. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

In the following essay, Schanfield compares Singer' short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” to the film adaptation, Yentl, arguing that the element of fantasy in Singer's story is lost in the film's realism.

Ironically, the recent film adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” underscores through its deviations from the original story Singer's own flirtation with the enigmatic world of fantasy. Singer's is an ambiguous tale of hermaphroditic experience in a world “where anything can happen.” Barbra Streisand's Yentl (based...